Postmodern Identities–Butler and Zizek

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This week we looked at the work of two contemporary thinkers, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek. We can see how they relate to questions of anti-foundationalism and the status of philosophy and psychoanalysis today. As usual these are my notes from the course. They are not my own work but that of Professor Roth.

Slavoj Žižek, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recommended Reading for this module

This week we looked at the work of two contemporary thinkers, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek. We can see how they relate to questions of anti-foundationalism and the status of philosophy and psychoanalysis today.

Gender as a performance.

Butler is a prolific author. She started her career with the work on French Hegelianism and the status of Hegel in modern France.

“The concept of desire was extremely important to me, the interplay between desire and recognition, which is so central to Hegel’s phenomenology.” (Interview)

Cover via Amazon

She moved on to work on gender and sexuality in a book called Gender Trouble which really was a game changer in the field of women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies and queer studies as it came to be called later. Gender Trouble was so surprising and so provocative because it brought together gender theory and theories of performance. She argued that gender is not an essential category, so she was anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist. She also said that gender had everything to do with performance and with improvisation.

Since then, Judith Butler has been working out the ramifications of taking performance seriously, while at the same time paying attention to the ways in which identity, sexuality and politics intersect in the contemporary world. In her interview with professor Roth {link} she says:-

“I think for me gender trouble was, well, it emerged from my activism. Some people said, you’re such a feminist, why don’t you do feminist scholarship? I thought, oh, no, I don’t want to do feminist scholarship. I just want to read my continental philosophy over here, and then have my feminist activism over there. But then I was invited to work on Beauvoir and Wittig and that involved me in a kind of critique of dominant forms of feminism at the time that seemed to assume that women to be recognized as a woman you had to be you had to be within a certain kind of heterosexual frame or you had have a particular relationship to the maternal. And I fought against that. And I, I wanted to open up the category, and I wanted to say that the category mis-recognizes certain people, or fails to recognize them altogether. So, maybe opening up the terms of recognition was one aim of Gender Trouble. “ (Interview)

Undoing Gender is a text from the last decade where Butler reconsiders the constellation of issues gender, sexuality, performance politics and ethics. The real focus is on the difference that vulnerability makes as we think about identity, responsibility, and performance.

“To understand gender as a historical category is to accept that gender, understood as one way of culturally configuring a body, is open to continual remaking, and that ‘anatomy’ and ‘sex’ are not without cultural framing.”(page 9/10)

That’s really important for Judith Butler these things are not natural, essential or cultural, they are open to continual remaking. Freedom and pleasure are found in this continual remaking. She is very sensitive to the charge that she writes as if people can just reinvent themselves willy-nilly, or ad-hoc, she’s not arguing that at all. She’s very much aware of how cultural re-framing is also an inhibition on remaking. She’s interested in how inhibition and remaking work together or intersect and that is certainly in the Foucauldian tradition. That is how prohibitions actually lead to new forms of identity and remaking. So she says that performance is a kind of doing.

“If gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint”

Judith Butler (photo Credit : wikimedai)

Improvisation is a very interesting word, because when you’re improvising with an instrument, you’re often not conscious of what you are about to play. That’s one of the keys about improvisation. It’s that combination of, of unpredictability and possibility that Butler is emphasizing here. She says there’s no easy way to separate the life of gender from the life of desire, our identity is very much affected by our passions or, our desires.

This leads her to a consideration of agency. Agency is a vexed subject for, Judith Butler because she does not want to rely on a concept of the self that sees the self as an author of everything that happens in the world that sees the self as controlling, as dominating. Because that would put her in the in the liberal individualist paradigm that has been criticized by a range of thinkers we’ve seen and from Horkheimer and Adorno through Foucault that is that the criticizing of this notion of the imperial or dominating self. She’s interested in agency as a mode of being that is ‘riven with paradoxes’.

“As a result, the ‘I’ finds itself at once constituted by norms and dependent on them but also endeavours to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them”

Gender is important for Butler because of her own political and ethical stances which involve her, in feminism and gay and lesbian, and transgender politics. She wants to have a philosophical context for those politics that emphasizes a possibility, freedom and recognition of the realities of social norms and cultural constraints

“After all, queer theory and activism acquired political salience by insisting that anti-homophobic activism can be engaged in by anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, and that identity markers are not prerequisites for political participation.”

You don’t have to be gay to be in favour of gay liberation just as you don’t have to be an Arab or a Jew to be in favour of Arab or Jewish liberation. There is a kind of activism that comes through identity, but it is not limited to essential identity markers.

“The task of all of these movements seems to me to be about distinguishing among the norms and conventions that permit people to breathe, to desire, to love and to live, and those norms and conventions that restrict or eviscerate the conditions of life itself.”

What brings these movements together for Butler is a politics of possibility that allows people to desire and to live more freely.

Sometimes she talks about it in terms of reducing vulnerability. All of those things could be seen as part of the enlightenment project. Making the world a better home for human beings is to give people the ability to breathe, to desire to love. Butler doesn’t really want to be just part of The Enlightenment Project that has also resulted in the marginalization or even the oppression of some and the degradation of the planet and the ecosystem. She wants a politics that will create these possibilities without falling into the dynamic of exclusion, marginalization and domination that has characterized The Enlightenment.

“What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is most liveable only for some and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives that is un-livable for some. The differences in position and desire set the limits to universalizability as an ethical reflex. The critique of gender norms must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a liveable life.” (Page 8)

Kant (Photo Credit : Wikimedia)

Universalizability as an ethical reflex hearkens back to Kant and his categorical imperative. ‘Act as if the maxim of your actions was in principal universalizable, that is that the principle of your action could be applicable to all people.’ That’s the Kantian ethical test. What Butler is saying is that the differences in who we are and what we desire set the limits of universalizability, you can’t universalize everything without homogenizing the differences among people, and that is unethical, it is oppressive. She wants to have limits to universalizability without giving up the project of a search for a reasonable basis, for enhanced possibilities, for livening together.

“If there are norms of recognition by which the human is constituted, and these norms encode operations of power, then it follows that the contest over the future of the human will be a contest over the power that works in and through such norms.” (Page 13)

The values that we use to legislate proper behaviour are infused with operations of power to make people become certain kinds of human beings. What looks like an ethical norm can really be an operation of power. Butler doesn’t believe that we could exist with an absence of norms but she wants us to be able to pay attention to how norms, when they operate, create patterns of exclusion and oppression that violate other norms that we have. If we learn to pay attention to those things, we won’t strive for perfect universalizability but to increase the likelihood that our actions will preserve a possibility for people to live with the desires, with the hopes, with the with the possibilities that they say they want to have

This goes back to Butler’s talk about improvisation We, we don’t always know what it means to inhabit a certain subject position. That is we don’t always know what it means to behave like a man, or to behave like a strong person, or to behave like a heterosexual or behave like a gay person. We don’t know exactly what those terms mean. But we are expected by our society today to somehow conform to patterns of identity that have been set down for us. How can we acknowledge these patterns of identity while still leaving room for improvisation?

We are being informed through institutions. We’re being called names. We’re being we’re having norms imposed on us. So who are we such that we. We receive or we’re, we’re vulnerable to being called certain names. Or we’re vulnerable to certain kinds of social expectations or norms or whatever. So you know, I felt like I actually needed to understand the domain of impressionability to understand how it is we might be at once socially constructed but also self-constituting. So I had to link those two things because there were some people who said, oh, Butler, it’s all social construction or, oh, Butler, it’s all volunteerism. I thought, oh, I better put these things together. “ (Interview)

This is the improvisation being a way of acting freely when you’re not just going according to a script. When you feel your life is just moving according to a script there’s a sense of constraint and control that can be extraordinarily oppressive. Where there’s a margin for improvisation, for invention, for self invention, for self fashioning that gives you a sense of freedom, and pleasure.

“There is always a dimension of ourselves and our relation to others that we cannot know and this not-knowing persists with us as a condition of existence and, indeed, of survivability.” (Page 15)

Butler doesn’t want us to think that it’s all about absolute knowledge that we need to grasp everything, philosophically or scientifically. This condition of not knowing, Freud called it the unconscious, is actually a part of our survivability.

“We are, to an extent, driven by what we do not know, and cannot know, and this ‘drive’(Trieb) is precisely what is neither exclusively biological nor cultural, nut always site of their dense convergence….. Sexuality emerges precisely as an improvisational possibility within this field of constraints.” (Page 15)

The great improvisations, say in jazz, are often on the basis of what we call standards, a great jazz song is called a standard. When we improvise, what we are doing is to acknowledge the background, the standard, and use it as a springboard for possibility. A standard gives rise to the possibility of invention, and then coming back to the standard and then going out again. That possibility is the kind of freedom and pleasure Butler wants to see more of in society.

Slavo Zizek

Slavoj Zizek (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like Judith Butler Zizek has become a philosopher, he has audiences all over the world in and outside of academia. He has written a lot about popular culture. His words and his performance resonate widely because of his attentiveness to non-academic forms of communication and his penchant for incisive readings of what we thought of as very familiar forms, whether that would be Hitchcock or other popular cinema. He uses humour wonderfully to instruct us on some really complex and difficult issues. If you search for him on Youtube there are hundreds of videos and he has huge audiences.

Zizek says that he has learned a lot from Jacque Lacan, a great French psychoanalyst and theorist who started of being very influenced, not only by Freud, but also by the surrealists and then by Alexander Cousev’s notion of master slave dialectic from Hegel. Lacan went on to write very enigmatic and powerful works about how language, the unconscious, and desire intersect and form a constellation of forces, that we could never fully understand but that structure our lives are subjective as are our fantasies and our actions.

As well as the short reading of “You May” we watched a couple of film clips from you tube. If you have a chance to look at the documentary Zizek {link} that gives you a sense of his ideas and of his way of thinking as a person moving through the world

In the text Zizek talks about modernism as a practice that orients itself around” an empty spot where we thought God was” . From modernism there was a notion that God is missing and that there is an empty spot where the God or the ordering principle or the sovereign of the world that we used to think was there isn’t, it is lacking.

“The lesson of modernism is that the machine revolves around an emptiness; the post modernist reversal shows the Thing itself as the incarnated, materialized emptiness.” (You May- p43)

Rather than just thinking that God is dead, the post modernism thinks that the materialized emptiness is this terrifying object that nonetheless structures are our very existence. For Zizek what happens is that we have a notion of what he calls ‘the big other’ that is some ordering principle of the universe. In post modernism, we realize that the force that determines what we are; who we are and what we do is itself materialized emptiness. There is a power of absence that controls us and defines our existence.

As Nietzsche said we don’t become free because we realise God is dead, we just realize that the force that structures us is a force of emptiness. Zizek puts it this way:-

“By the mere act of speaking we suppose the existence of the Big Other, the guarantor of meaning….”

When we engage in an act of speaking, we acknowledge that there are a set of rules that guarantee meaning. If we didn’t act as if there were such a set of rules we would be crazy, we would be as he says, “Psychotic.”

“Believing there is a code to be cracked is of course much the same as believing in the existence of the Big Other.”

What Zizak is interested in is the ways in which what looks like prohibition actually gives rise to desire, and what looks like desire becomes a form of prohibition. What he tends to do is to emphasize that what looks like x is really y, and what pretends to be y is really z. He does this in a way that acknowledges our first perceptions of the situation but then reverses those perceptions.

The post modern father wants to control the desire of the child. In a permissive society there is a different form of repression, a different kind of transgression.

“In a permissive society, the rigidly codified, authoritarian master /slave relationship becomes transgressive. This paradox or reversal is the proper topic of psychoanalysis: psychoanalysis does not deal with the authoritarian father who prohibits enjoyment, but with the obscene father who enjoins it and thus renders you impotent or frigid. The unconscious is not secret resistance to the law, but the law itself.” (P7)

For Zizek the obscene father is this post-modern father who makes you want to do something rather than just prohibit you from doing something you originally wanted to do. The obscene father is a symbol of lots of other things that, under the guise of permissiveness tells you what to feel, and what to think.

We see this all the time in contemporary American society. We say, we want you to be tolerant, we want you to be free, we want you to be accepting of everyone, and so we’re going to train you how to do so. We’re going to show you what kind of language to use what kind of behaviour to have with other people. By giving you more tolerance, we’re going to also impose on you a code of politically correct speech, politically correct action, so you have politically correct desires. This is what Zizek finds so intriguing about contemporary, postmodern society. He talks about the pleasures of obedience.

“For psychoanalysis the perversion of the human libidinal economy is what follows from the prohibition of some pleasurable activity: not a life led in strict obedience to the law and deprived of all pleasure, but a life in which exercising the law provides a pleasure of its own, a life in which performance of the ritual destined to keep illicit temptation at bay becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction”

The very act of prohibiting other people from getting pleasure becomes our pleasure. What’s interesting for Zizek is the way in which exercising the rules of prohibition becomes its own kind of pleasure, its own game of erotics. He talks about erotic repression.

“Regulatory power mechanisms and procedures become reflexively eroticised: although repression first emerges as an attempt to regulate any desire considered ‘illicit’ by the predominant socio-symbolic, it can only survive in the psychic economy if the desire for regulation is there – if the very activity of regulation becomes libidinally invested and turns into a source of libidinal satisfaction.”

We get off on the rules for Zizek. It’s not about freeing ourselves from the rules, it’s about the rules becoming their own source of enjoyment and how that can be perversely put into society. He says,

“The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, in the case of the obscene or postmodern father the trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all. Worse than that, he is being given an order and told to smile at the same time. Not only must you visit your grandma, whatever you feel, but, you must visit your grandma and you must be glad to do it. The superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do.”

Find pleasure in work, find pleasure in obedience. This, for Zizek, is the true perversion because it insists on a different kind of conformity, while under the guise of tolerance. So he says, our post-modern society has a kind of rule saturation.

“Our post-modern reflexive society which seems hedonistic and permissive is actually saturated with rules and regulations, which are intended to serve our well-being ( Restrictions on smoking and eating, rules against sexual harassment).”

All these rules become their own form of pleasure even as they control us more and more. Zizek is fascinated by how we create objects of desire which have evacuated from them all the things that made them desirable. Decaffeinated coffee, beer without alcohol a whole range of things where we still have ‘the label ‘ of the original object, but all the things in the object that were bad for us, which is what made them desirable are gone. For Zizek duty becomes a pleasure

“The superficial opposition between pleasure and duty is overcome in two different ways. Totalitarian power goes even further than traditional authoritarian power. What it says, in effect, is, do your duty, I don’t care whether you like it or not. Totalitarian power says in effect, not, do your duty, I don’t care whether you like it, but, you must do your duty, and you must enjoy doing it. (This is how totalitarian democracy works. It is not enough for the people to follow their leader, they must love him)…….. Duty becomes pleasure and then pleasure becomes duty. The obverse paradox is that pleasure becomes duty in a permissive society. Subjects experience the need to have a good time to enjoy themselves as a kind of duty, consequently feeling guilty for failing to be happy.”

Nobody really wants to hear it, if you say you are not happy or you really hate your job. They get embarrassed and don’t know what to say, it’s like a confession of some sexual perversion. I’m doing my job because I’m paid. Oh no that’s bad; you should do your job because you love it. It should be your passion. The only things we should do are things that give us pleasure. For Zizek, this is a totalitarian democracy. Under the guise of being nice, we want you to enjoy yourself; we want you to be happy. What they’re really saying to you is you must love what you are told to do.

Pleasure, becomes a duty. The possibility for transgression in is a hard question for Zizek. It may be that, actually performing the old-fashion rituals of oppression become new forms of transgression against the soft permissive oppression of post-modern, totalitarian democracies. What Zizek is wanting us to understand is the way that pleasure and power get intertwined.

He doesn’t have a political program. He’s not asking us to help the poor or to get rid of the rich or to increase or decrease production, of consumer goods. Fro his perspective, is, what he’s doing is playing the role, in some ways, of an analyst, the philosopher as psychoanalyst. That is, he’s asking us. What can we possibly mean by what we are doing? What can we, what do we think we’re up to when we look at ourselves in these particular ways? Why are we asking the questions we’re asking? Why are we, framing the world as we are framing it? This is the task of the philosopher. The philosopher isn’t going to feed the hungry. Zizak even talks about it from his bed.

So what do you ask a philosopher? You ask a philosopher, why are we concerned with the possibility of catastrophe when there is catastrophe all around us already? Why do we frame the world the way we do? Why do we ask the questions the way we do? Why do we accept certain kinds of answers as true and not others? How do we manipulate our expectations for freedom and pleasure in ways that clearly make us more miserable? These are the kind of questions that the philosopher doesn’t answer, but throws back to us because there is no foundation for an answer. There’s no ‘telos’ for political practice there’s just the possibility of reframing the way we think about the world by being more aware of the frames that already exist

8 Comments

Hi Louise, I just wanted to thank you for always posting your blog entries. Not so we can copy, but be inspired by your diligence! I never did get round to blogging in this course, just not enough time this round, but I’m half considering doing it again, 3 of us formed a google + community in which we were very active, and posted a lot, plus our essays, and that was fun, and a great place to vent when we felt writers block and other such things. Different ways of charting our journeys I guess.Anyhow, thanks again for always being so open with your learning, Angela

Thank you so much for saying so Angela.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this course and the conversations I have had on facebook and the discussion pages. I love to share and I am doing the writing anyway so it is easy to share. I am nearly finished with the last week and will put up my latest essay today.

Great job there! I came upon your blog trying to find who that “Alexander Cousev” is, while watching this week’s video lectures. That was a hard one!! Actually his name is spelled “Alexandre Kojève” 😉 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kojeve